Analysis of Two Major Characters

Analysis of Two Major Characters

DAVID STRORM

David Strorm in the novel, The Chrysalids, is the main character. He learns at a very young age that he is different from most people. He was a member of a small group of kids who can communicate with each using telepath, however his ability only allows him to receive messages from the people who have the same ability but he cannot receive them form any random person. This ability causes many problems for David – although he is able face his enemies courageously, and is willing to adapt to a new culture
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David, overtime, gains many enemies because of his difference. The community was his biggest enemy because he feels isolated from them. The people in the community are all the same and David is different. David faces his enemy by living with them for most of his life and he had a great risk of being caught by town officials. It was hard for David to fit in with the society he lived in. The town could not tell that David was different but he knew his differences and that was hard for him to deal with, but he did. David faced his fears everyday because a new situation would arise and it would highlight his difference. The town eventually found out about David’s difference and sent him away to the Fringes.

It was not easy David to overcome the feeling of never being accepted in his own family. He had to face enemies that were much braver and stronger than he was. He had to adapt to a new culture he knew nothing about, when he escaped to New Zealand. He overcame each of these obstacles and did so with courage, understating, love and self pride. He out all his strength into it and he succeeded. He looked out for the friends he had made and wanted the best for all of them.

Uncle Axel

In “The Chrysalids” the character of Uncle Axel represents an alternative truth that helps shape the protagonist David Strorm into the person he becomes. Axel is a key ally of the telepaths but does not appear until the fourth chapter, and is barely mentioned in the last third of the book. Nevertheless, he is one of the most important characters in The Chrysalids. He offers the reader insights to the world outside of Labrador as he recounts his sea travels to the Badlands, and the pockets of strange human life forms found beyond its reaches. He helps to put into perspective the distance from which the Sealand Woman has to travel to reach David, Petra and the other telepaths. He also eliminates a potential problem in the movement and flow of the novel when he kills the character of Alan Ervin who would have exposed the telepaths much earlier in the storyline.

Uncle Axel is described as a tall, sturdy man with weathered hands and forearms, bushy eyebrows and a tanned complexion. He is the most trustworthy character that David interacts with. He shows this through various ways, but mostly through his dedicated keep of David, Petra and the other telepaths’ secret from the people of Waknuk. If it was not for the early intervention of Uncle Axel, David most likely would have cracked and revealed his mutation to his father long before the birth of his sister Petra.

He is an alternative father figure to David, in most ways he is more of a father to David that Joseph Strorm ever was.  This is evidenced in the story by the moment when David felt secure enough to reveal his telepathic abilities to Uncle Axel. Instead of condemning his nephew, he shelters him and advises him to remain steadfast in his protection of this secret from others. His protection of David is made absolute when he reveals that he shot Alan 
Ervin with an arrow through the neck, to keep him from exposing the truth about the telepaths.

Uncle Axel is also extremely open-minded; he is more willing to accept change and embraces the possibility of the unknown. Axel is the only older character in Waknuk who supports the view that David and his fellow telepaths may actually be closer to the “true image of God” and more akin to the fabled “Old People”. He is quoted as saying “Perhaps the Old People were the image: very well then, one of the things they say about them is that they could talk to one another over long distances. Now we can't do that -- but you and Rosalind can. Just think that over, Davie. You two may be nearer to the image than we are”.